Earlier this year, like every year since 2011, Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com published his annual martech supergraphic.
The 2020 supergraphic maps 8,000 martech applications out there.
In 2019, his team mapped out 7,040 marketing technology tools. And back then he said that it is by no means comprehensive! There are many, many more that they haven’t been able to map.
Eight thousand and counting? Are people even buying them? Yes, they are. Last year the martech spends worldwide crossed USD 121 billion!
So there you are, part of a high growth industry, with the unenviable job of selecting the right applications for your marketing and sales requirements. Unenviable, because 8000 is a tad big a pool to choose from! Unenviable, because most martech tools are running such powerful marketing campaigns that it’s easy to have FOMO (fear of missing out, in case you’re a GenXer like me). Unenviable, because there’s likely a chasm between what you need and what your budgets might allow.
But the good thing is that marketers are more risk taking than their IT colleagues. Marketers need to see results, which is why 83% of marketers rip-and-replace a martech app each year. They decide on a few tools, see what works. And what doesn’t work is ripped off and replaced. This is usually done to get better features, integrations and savings.
Some of us are in that space, many of us aren’t. Many of us are yet to even fully comprehend the import of martech, or the tech stack we need to run our sales and marketing right.
And as we emerge from post-pandemic blues, there is now, more than ever, a need to know how well is the marketing program working, and can sales do better?
More than ever, we can’t afford to have data live in silos. For instance, the CRM has sales data. The marketing automation tool has its own campaign info. But one may sense that all of it is not adding up in the right way for the business. Maybe we need an integration to make the CRM talk to the marketing automation tool seamlessly. Or maybe we need a tool that has both capabilities.
Yes, it’s a complex thing. But one can start with the basics.
Your basic martech stack needs to have a CRM, a sales tool and a marketing automation tool.
A CRM where all the prospect and customer data lives, and you have the ability to enrich that data.
A sales tool to track how the sales team is doing, and how the deals are flowing through the pipeline.
A marketing automation tool that helps you run campaigns and collect insights on what works best for your sales pipeline health.
And now you have all of them on the same platform, making the data flow more seamless.
That’s the very least. On top of that, depending on what your focus is, you might want to explore enriched databases, intent data, ad targeting, content personalization, video prospecting, email signature marketing, data visualization and more. And depending on your company’s IT setup, you might need the data to flow into other systems, such as an ERP system, an electronic health records system, and so on. Or want WhatsApp integrated into the system.
So every company’s martech stack is different and unique to their business. What works for one simply won’t for other companies.
Yes, this is a bit of a complex topic. Is the martech piece bothering you? What is a better tool for you? Are you overpaying for your apps? Send us your questions on martech, we’ll be happy to help!